I am Brigitte (42) and I live in the Netherlands. I live with my wonderful husband and our sweet little hamsters.
In 2002 I started drawing and painting again since my childhood. I am a selfthaught 'artist'.
At first I started with watercolors (it was the only class I could join at that moment) and I learned to master this material to a certain level. Mostly I made still lives.Then a new teacher came and she introduced me into pastel. At this moment I love to draw animal portraits in pastel. It's a wonderful material with which you can achieve that nice, furry effect. For my portraits I use Rembrandt Soft Pastels for the larger areas. For the details I use the pastel pencils from Stabilo and Derwent.
I made a stop-motion movie about how I create a portrait, you can find it here: click.
After I started blogging in 2006, I came into 'contact' with so many wonderful artists around the world - all working with different materials and creating amazing artwork. It gave me an itch to try other materials: charcoal, sanguine, colored pencils and so on.
In November 2008 I started to participate in Illustration Friday (IF). Creating illustrations was totally new to me, and my first entries were not all that good. But I didn't give up and eventually I met Zoë. Zoë is a cute little sheep, that appears in almost every IF illustration of mine. Sometime accompanied by her friends Mr. Hedgehog and Mr. Owl. You want to meet Zoë too? Click here to meet her.
Animals
A few years ago my husband gave me a cute Russian hamster for my birthday. He thought: a little animal, a little cage - that'll be fun. But I liked him (I still remember that cute little guy: Boris) so much, that after Boris died, I wanted another one... and another one... and now I have three of them!!
Other creative hobbies
In the second half of 2008 I passed my exams for graphic designer. Creating digital art or invitations/posters is wonderful to do. Too bad I don't have much time for it.
Lately I became more interested in taking pictures, so that I have my own collection of reference material. Flowers, animals - nothing is safe in front of my camera. Because I like taking pictures, I got a great new camera for my birthday. With 30x optical zoom, supermacro and HD movies - I love it!
Brigitte
You can contact me at: atelierbrigitte[at]gmail[dot]com.
